The compulsion to be cruel: contemporary returns

“That is too idealistic... and therefore cruel,” says Vanya in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s 1861 novel The Insulted and Injured (Dostoevsky 2011, 153). Reflecting the contradictions between the structures of the transforming Russian industrial world and the traditional humanist belief in a better future, Dostoevsky’s novel taps into the many ways in which the unaccomplished produces an impossible promise of satisfaction. In this, the novel becomes a sort of explanatory metaphor of what 150 years later Lauren Berlant would call a relation of “cruel optimism.” According to Berlant, this relation exists when “something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing” (Berlant 2011, 1). In fact, not only does it suggest the possibility of fulfillment that is forever deferred, but it also actually makes it impossible, as she writes, to attain the expansive transformation that is attached to this longing (2).